Lord and Lady Dacre were among my kindest friends.  With Lady Dacre I corresponded from the beginning of our acquaintance until her death, which took place at a very advanced age.  She was strikingly handsome, with a magnificent figure and great vivacity and charm of manner and conversation.  Her accomplishments were various, and all of so masterly an excellence that her performances would have borne comparison with the best works of professional artists.  She drew admirably, especially animals, of which she was extremely fond.  I have seen drawings of groups of cattle by her that, without the advantage of color, recall the life and spirit of Rosa Bonheur’s pictures.  She was a perfect Italian scholar, having studied enthusiastically that divine tongue with the enthusiast Ugo Foscolo, whose patriotic exile and misfortunes were cheered and soothed by the admiring friendship and cordial kindness of Lord and Lady Dacre.  Among all the specimens of translation with which I am acquainted, her English version of Petrarch’s sonnets is one of the most remarkable for fidelity, beauty, and the grace and sweetness with which she has achieved the difficult feat of following in English the precise form of the complicated and peculiar Italian prosody.  These translations seem to me as nearly perfect as that species of literature can be.  But the most striking demonstrations of her genius were the groups of horses which Lady Dacre modeled from nature, and which, copied and multiplied in plaster casts, have been long familiar to the public, without many of those who know and admire them being aware who was their author.  It is hardly possible to see anything more graceful and spirited, truer at once to nature and the finest art, than these compositions, faithful in the minutest details of execution, and highly poetical in their entire conception.  Lady Dacre was the finest female rider and driver in England; that is saying, in the world.  Had she lived in Italy in the sixteenth century her name would be among the noted names of that great artistic era; but as she was an Englishwoman of the nineteenth, in spite of her intellectual culture and accomplishments she was only an exceedingly clever, amiable, kind lady of fashionable London society.

Of Lord Dacre it is not easy to speak with all the praise which he deserved.  He inherited his title from his mother, who had married Mr. Brand of the Hoo, Hertfordshire, and at the moment of his becoming heir to that estate was on the point of leaving England with Colonel Talbot, son of Lord Talbot de Malahide, to found with him a colony in British Canada, where Arcadia was to revive again, at a distance from all the depraved and degraded social systems of Europe, under the auspices of these two enthusiastic young reformers.  Mr. Brand had completed his studies in Germany, and acquired, by assiduous reading and intimate personal acquaintance with the most enlightened and profound thinkers of the philosophical school of which Kant was the apostle, a mental cultivation very unlike, in its depth and direction, the usual intellectual culture of young Englishmen of his class.